Reading Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

I’m about half way through Robert Graves’s autobiography Goodbye to All That. My interest in reading it was sparked by Testament of Youth: Brittain points to Graves’s book both as an inspiration for her own memoir of the war and as a kind of counter-example to it, as she wanted her book to tell a very different story about the war, the one she thought was (to some extent inevitably) overshadowed by battlefield accounts.

So far, Goodbye to All That definitely is a very different book, as much because of Graves’s different tone and personality as because of the difference in their experiences. I’ve been trying to figure out just what makes it sound so different from Testament of Youth. One factor, I think, is that in the early parts, Graves has quite a wry and engaging sense of humor. For all that I found Brittain’s voice compelling, I don’t recall ever finding her funny, and in fact the extent to which she takes herself seriously is probably the least attractive thing about her books–though I also, perhaps paradoxically, respect her intellectual seriousness very much. Graves writes with more ease, somehow: he sounds very confident and direct, and the narrative has a lot of forward momentum. There’s not much reflection on broader contexts or issues (again, so far), which helps things move along briskly–but it’s odd to find that we are now well into the war (and deep into the trenches) and Graves really hasn’t said anything about the war as a larger event–about why it was being fought and how he felt about that, about its effect on his generation or society more generally, about any of the things Brittain (who often writes with a retrospective cast) sees as motivating her story. Testament of Youth is very much a reflective book about the effects of the war on a generation. Goodbye to All That just carries us along with Graves, who doesn’t give the impression that he himself thought deeply about the war at all before or during it, and who isn’t infusing his account of it with whatever he might have come to think about it later. As a result, the war seems doubly meaningless, both in itself and as the subject of his book, and there’s a way in which that seems appropriate given how chaotic, haphazard, and insane it seems to have been to those fighting it.

Here’s a little bit from the description of his first major action, near Bethune in 1915:

No orders could come through because the shell in the signals dugout at battalion headquarters had cut communication not only between companies and battalion, but between battalion and division. The officers in the front trench had to decide on immediate action; so two companies of the Middlesex, instead of waiting for the intense bombardment which would follow the advertised forty minutes of gas [much of which had spread back into the British lines], charged at once and got as far as the German wire – which our artillery had not yet cut. So far it had been treated only with shrapnel, which had no effect on it; the barbed-wire needed high-explosive, and plenty of it. The Germans shot the Middlesex men down. One platoon is said to have found a gap and gotten into the German trench. But there were no survivors of the platoon to confirm this. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders went over, also, on the Middlesex left; but two companies, instead of charging at once, rushed back out of the gas-filled assault trench to the support line, and attacked from there. It will be recalled that the trench system had been pushed forward nearer the enemy in preparation for the battle. These companies were therefore attacking from the old front line, but the barbed-wire entanglements protecting it had not been removed, so that the Highlanders got caught and machine-gunned between their own assault and support lines. The other two companies were equally unsuccessful.

The account of their work that night bringing in the wounded and dead is as harrowing as you’d expect. “The Germans behaved generously,” Graves remarks, not firing on them “though we kept on until it was nearly dawn.” He reports that the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders “had seven hundred casualties, including fourteen officers killed out of the sixteen who went over; the Middlesex, five hundred and fifty casualties, including eleven officers killed.” The tone is similarly matter-of-fact throughout, sometimes with a degree of detachment that is disconcerting: “I found no excitement in patrolling, no horror in the continual experience of death.” Will he eventually say something about the emotional and psychological experience of the scenes he depicts with such precision? One night he goes out on patrol in No Man’s Land; while crawling through the mud and barbed wire, he recalls, “I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted them on the slimy body of an old corpse.” How do you just move on from this, as he does? Literally, of course, he had to, but he’s moving through a landscape in which craters are inhabited by “the corpses of men who had been wounded and crept in there to die. Some were skeletons, picked clean by the rats.” I’m very curious to see if or how he moves from description to reflection.

A New Year, A New Term!

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Winter term classes start for us today. Happily, it’s a dry day, with no ice or snow complicating the back-to-school logistics. On the other hand, with the wind chill it “feels like” -21C, so there’s no forgetting that it is winter. (The distinction between the actual temperature and what it feels like always seems such a silly one: who cares what temperature it doesn’t feel like?)

Things ease up for me a bit this term, as I shift down from three courses to two. I prefer it this way, as I find winter both physically and psychologically exhausting. Also, there’s less time to get ready for it than there is to prepare for the fall term! I was marking exams until December 23, and with such an early start date for this term, I had to start puttering away on syllabi and handouts and Blackboard sites and reading for my new courses pretty much as soon as my fall grades were filed. However, I do feel pretty well prepared this week. We’ll see how long that lasts!

I’m teaching one class this term that I haven’t taught since I started blogging–since even before then, actually, as I last offered it in 2005. This is a class on ‘Close Reading,’ which, as I explained at some length in lecture today, is one of our department’s core ‘theory and methods’ classes (the others are ‘History of Literary Criticism’ and ‘Contemporary Critical Theory’). When I first taught Close Reading, back in 2003, it had fairly recently been invented and added to the curriculum as a mandatory class for all English Honours and Majors students. I found it exhilarating teaching a class that so clearly had (or, appeared to have!) the backing of the whole department: it made it easy to make statements about the use and value of the skills we were practicing. Now that students are required to choose one from this cluster, I make my pitch in a somewhat different way, focusing not just on what I still see as the generic importance of close reading skills to answering all critical and interpretive questions, but also on the extra-curricular importance of really paying attention to, and asking questions about, the things we read. There are lots of good reasons for English students to learn about the history of criticism and about the array of theoretical approaches that are practiced in our discipline. There are also discipline-specific reasons for working hard on close reading. But the specialized approach and vocabulary of literary theory becomes less and less useful and relevant the further you get from campus–which is not to say literary theory has no value, or no intrinsic interest (though at times I have thought both of these things myself!). But the importance of being an attentive, well-informed, questioning reader matters more and more as you get away from school and take over primary responsibility for your own book lists! Much of what we require of students in our curriculum aims at making them mini-critics, mini-professionals, but that’s exactly what most of them won’t be. I particularly emphasized in my talk today ways in which close reading takes us through aesthetic questions into ethical ones: here I am influenced, of course, by Wayne Booth, and in fact I quoted some of what he says about the choices that lie behind the finished literary product, and about the choice we make about whether we want to be “friends” with particular books. I hope that these general remarks helped frame the course in an interesting and even provocative way for the students. Much of what we will be doing on a day to day basis will be much more concrete, down in the nitty-gritty details. But if they can think about where this kind of analysis can take them, or about what kinds of broader conversations it supports and enhances, I think they’ll find it a more resonant experience.

My other class is the second installment of the 19th-century novel, the Dickens-to-Hardy half. I taught this last in 2009, when the book list was North and South, Great Expectations, Lady Audley’s Secret, Middlemarch, and Jude the Obscure. I shuffle the books around a bit every time, and this time I’m leading off with Barchester Towers–in past versions of the course, I have often started with The Warden, which I am very fond of, but I’ve been wanting to bring in Barchester Towers for a long time so finally I just made up my mind to it. Since I’ve never lectured on it before, I’m feeling slightly regretful right now, since if I were doing The Warden again I’d have all my materials to hand plus I’d be intimately familiar with the novel. But I’ve been rereading Barchester Towers and enjoying it enormously. How could I not? It is funny, poignant, sharp, and sentimental–sometimes all at once! I’ve kept Great Expectations (though I kind of wish I’d had the guts to sub in Bleak House, just because, well, because it’s Bleak House, and because I’ve taught and thus read Great Expectations pretty often lately). Then it’s The Woman in White, which I alternate with Lady Audley, and then Middlemarch and Jude to close. The tweaks in the book list keep me alert. I decided to stick with the letter exchange assignments that I used last term. I haven’t actually had time to look at my fall course evaluations, so I don’t know if the students were happy with the assignment sequence, but there are a lot of things I like about it, including keeping everyone focused on every book as we go, and giving them lots of writing practice.

I have put one small innovation in place in the 19th-century fiction class. I have been regretting the difficulties of having more direct contact with students as class sizes in general go up, and in these 19th-century novels classes I have also been feeling that there is less reciprocal engagement during class sessions–I have my lecture notes more carefully planned out, usually, and though there is always a core of talkers in the class when I work on generating discussion, there are also a lot who don’t speak up and thus at least seem fairly passive. I have a theory that this passivity sometimes (not always) shows up in their written work: it’s not very lively, it’s not very excited, it’s very safe (if they are attentive) or off the mark (if they aren’t). Students who come to confer with me one-on-one very often not only do better assignments and show more improvement across the term, but seem more energetic in class. Of course, this correlation is probably because those who come to see me are precisely those who have that extra bit of keenness! Anyway, I wanted to change the classroom dynamic a bit, so I’ve designated most Friday classes as seminar meetings: I’m dividing the class into two subsections, and each time one group will meet with me seminar-style, around a table. With a class of 40, we can’t do better than 20 for these, but 20 is actually the usual size for our 4th-year seminars, and it’s much smaller than a typical tutorial in the classes where this kind of break-out group is the norm (these are usually around 30). We’ll do general discussion but also some worksheets and practice for assignments–tutorial kind of stuff. I hope this will help them get to know both me and the course material better, in a different way. It will also force me to change up what I do with the other hours and to loosen up a bit in my own control of our time. There’s nothing intrinsically radical about including tutorials, of course, but they are not at all the norm here for classes of this size and at this level. We’ll see how the plan goes over!

A New Year, A New Open Letters!

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Welcome to 2012! What better way could there be to usher it in than to pore over the lovingly-edited pieces in the brand new issue of Open Letters Monthly?

I think we’ve started the year off well, with four members of our core editorial team contributing pieces: John Cotter reviews a risky new novel about Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 111; Greg Waldmann takes us on an exhilarating trip not only through Charles Rosen’s book on Music and Sentiment but also through some wonderful examples and analysis of that underappreciated form, classical music; the inimitable (and apparently indefatigable) Steve Donoghue writes a wonderful appreciation of a 5-volume 19th-century biography of Prince Albert (yes, really–you may have to read the piece to believe me, but it’s terrific); and I go back to the Victorians with a ‘Second Glance’ feature on Anne Bronte’s wonderfully smart and provocative The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 

Of the other wide-ranging and interesting pieces we are running this month, I’ll highlight two in particular, as I’m pleased to have had a hand in bringing them to Open Letters. Amardeep Singh offers up a knowledgeable perspective on Rabindranath Tagore, about whom I knew little but would now like to know more, and Dorian Stuber reviews Steve Sem-Sandberg’s ambitious novel The Emperor of Lies, taking the opportunity to consider broader issues about the difficulty of representing the Holocaust–not just in fiction, but at all.

There’s also new poetry and new cover art (and an interview with the artist, Bill Amundson); our regular mystery columnist writes up P. D. James’s Death at Pemberly; we introduce our new poetry editor … and that’s not all, so I hope you’ll come over and take a look.

Novel Readings 2011

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

It’s time again for my ritual look back and the highs and lows of my reading year. Because I was on sabbatical for the few half of 2011, I got quite a lot of reading done–or so it seems, anyway. Since I don’t keep statistics, I can’t be sure if the quantity of books was particularly high in 2011. But the range of my reading was greater because of the greater freedom. Some of the reading I undertook solely out of personal interest turned out to be fruitful in unanticipated ways–indeed, so much so that the next time a colleague asks when I find time to “do all that reading,” I just might answer “my reading is my research.”

Book of the Year:

This one’s a tie, this year, between Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai and Vera Brittain’s  Testament of Youth (on which I wrote three different posts). It’s hard to imagine two more different books! But both are outstanding and profoundly affected me. DeWitt noted recently on her blog that The Last Samurai ” is, for the time being, well and truly out of print”–I thought so, as after I finally read my copy and was overwhelmed by its combination of heart and intellectual pyrotechnics I thought I might give some copies as gifts this season and could not find any new copies around. (She recommends buying a used copy and sending a donation via PayPal: if you don’t yet own The Last Samurai and would like a mind-bending read, do as she says!) The impact Brittain’s work has had on me is extensive, as blog readers will know. In addition to the further reading I’ve been doing about Brittain, Holtby, and their contemporaries, I’ve proposed a new seminar (to be offered in the fall!) on the ‘Somerville Novelists.’ Expect significant rereading, and also some energetic research, over the next several months.

Other Books I’m Particularly Glad I Read:

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Story of Crime. I am so glad I finally took the advice I had received a few times over the past couple of years and looked up this fabulous series of police procedurals. They greatly expanded my understanding and appreciation of crime fiction in general and Scandinavian crime fiction more particularly, and they are also just really great reads.

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus. This was one of the Slaves of Golconda choices for this year. It’s a dense, intense, moving novel that interested me while I was reading it but got more and more interesting as I thought about it afterwards. It’s a novel I am tempted to assign one day, in part for an excuse to work through it really carefully (including noticing the various subtle clues about its plot and conclusion that I didn’t properly process on my first reading).

Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. This very depressing book was one of the choices of my local book group. Absorbing and moving as it was, I admit I’m glad that after it, we broke the trend of depressing novels about drink and religion.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day and The Last September. The Heat of the Day was another book group selection. It was not particularly successful in that context, but I found it a difficult but mesmerizing read and was prompted to explore Bowen further. I thought The Last September was marvellous, and I’ve got The Death of the Heart in my TBR pile for 2012.

Vera Brittain, Testament of Friendship. I would have found this book compelling even if it weren’t part of my developing interest in these particular women, just for its attention to women’s friendships.

Robert Graves, I, Claudius. This was a tough one. I didn’t love reading it, exactly, and I would have found it even harder if I hadn’t cheated a little by watching the astonishing BBC adaptation first–but how else was I expected to remember who everybody was? But it’s a brilliant book.

J. G. Farrell, Troubles. This one I just thoroughly enjoyed. It’s smart, dark, devious, and intermittently hilarious. It too has added to my 2012 TBR list, as having been introduced to the peculiar genius of J. G. Farrell, now I have to read the other volumes in his Empire Trilogy.

Jennifer Crusie, Anyone But You. It’s not this book in particular that matters so much as its role in overcoming my prejudice against romance fiction. I still feel sheepish browsing the romance section at the library (the covers! must they be so tawdry? and must the books have the tacky heart stickers on them?), but opening myself up to the possibility that I might enjoy books in this genre has paid off as I’ve discovered some others I like even better.

Books I Didn’t Much Like:

Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers. This one could actually go in the “glad I read” list, on the grounds that although I really didn’t like it at all, it was part of the learning curve I was going through about Scandinavian crime fiction, and it was the comment thread on this post that reminded me I should finally try Sjöwall and Wahlöö.

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children. Couldn’t finish it–one of only two deliberately abandoned books this year (the other was Molly Gloss’s Wild Life). But I’m keeping it (them, in fact). Books have their moments, and enough smart people (including Elizabeth Hardwick) think well enough of The Man Who Loved Children that I expect I’ll try again some other time.

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Meh.

Terry Castle, The Professor. Nasty. Self-involved. Funny. An uncomfortable combination.

Colm Toibin, Brooklyn. I understand the suggestion that the narrative mimics Eilis’s own suppressed personality. It’s risky to be flat on purpose: something else needs to leak through, or else you’re just, well, flat. That’s how Brooklyn seemed to me. I have The Master, though, and look forward to reading it. If it’s style is different enough, I’ll believe the “he’s being flat on purpose” argument, though I can’t promise that it will make me like Brooklyn any better.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot. I already wrote 5000 words on this novel–I think that’s enough!

The Low Point:

Paula McLain, The Paris Wife.

My Year in Writing:

I wrote four pieces for Open Letters Monthly in 2011–well, five, if you count the one that won’t appear until January 1, which I just finished revising this morning. Of these, the essay on Ahdaf Soueif means the most to me, because I seized what felt to me like an important opportunity to consider Soueif’s fiction in relation to the ongoing Egyptian revolution. But I was also pleased with the review of Sara Paretsky’s Body Work, because it gave me a chance to articulate what I’ve learned from teaching about her work in my mystery classes. The other two–reviews of Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot–proved very difficult to write, but in the end I was glad I had thought through why both books left me so dissatisfied. I had the most fun with the new piece, probably because it brought me back to Victorian fiction (still, in spite of everything, my home turf!).

I wrote some other blog posts in 2011 that particularly stand out for me as I review my archives:

‘Baking Has Taken On a Sinister Character’: My Grandmother the Writer: This one’s a personal favorite. My grandmother was very dear to me as well as very influential, and there are many things about her and her life that I appreciate more (or at least differently) as I age.

Not Quite Cricket: Dorothy Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise: This post was such a lot of fun to write! I had been wanting to revisit Murder Must Advertise ever since a colleague got my goat by not taking it seriously at all qua novel, as if Sayers, as a “genre” writer, couldn’t possibly be doing anything interesting. (The trend continues.) As I wrote (and wrote and wrote), I found plenty interesting going on–and Murder Must Advertise isn’t even Sayers’s best novel.

SATC2: Just because it’s not a good movie doesn’t mean the appropriate response is to make fun of it, or of the women who went to see it.

Reality Check: My ‘Spotty’ Publication Record: Yes, I was venting, but in the process I think I had some important things to say about the ways standard methods of evaluating academic scholarship box us in.

Cassuto on Blog: ‘I have nothing against them, but I don’t read them either’ (and the follow-up): As I spent a lot of time in the spring and summer preparing a presentation on academic blogging, I had a lot to say about the dismissive attitude towards blogs as a form that doesn’t seem to have improved much in the past 5 years. At the very least, I think people who don’t read blogs should not pronounce on them, any more than people who have never logged on to Twitter and tried following some people who share their interests should pronounce on Twitter.

Books I’m Most Looking Forward to Reading in 2012:

Reviewing my list of books I looked forward to reading in 2011, I’m glad to report that I did in fact read a lot of them! The Last Samurai, for example, was on that list, as was The Power and the Glory, Kristin Lavransdatter, unspecified Virago classics (I read a number of them), and Brooklyn. There are some carry-forwards from that list: War and Peace and Madame Bovary, and the rest of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf, for sure. As always, I have stacks of books around that all look enticing, but I can point to a few that I am particularly keen to get to sooner rather than later:

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet

 Angela Thirkell, Wild Strawberries

J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip

Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

The Iliad

Naguib Mahfouz, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier, The Fountain Overflows, and Black Lamb, Grey Falcon

Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder

Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (forthcoming)

First up, though (besides the books for my classes, which start up again all too soon) will be Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, this too for my book group.

Once again I’d like to thank everyone who reads and comments here at Novel Readings. A special thanks to all of you who keep up your own engaging, diverse, and endlessly stimulating book blogs: I feel very fortunate in the community of readers and writers I have found online. Best wishes for 2012!

 

Santa Claus is People!

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

presentsYears ago, when our children were very little, we decided we were not going to lie to them about the existence of Santa Claus. Though as I recall we did debate it a little, in the end it was not a difficult decision, and it is not one we have ever regretted. As far as possible, we always try to be honest with our children and didn’t like the idea of one day disillusioning them–not just about Santa, but about us (“Yes, Mommy and Daddy lied to you repeatedly, because we thought it was cute!”). Of course we understand that people who pretend Santa Claus is real do so in the cheerful spirit of fun, fantasy, and fairy tales, and overall it’s probably a harmless kind of thing, but we also have a general aversion to unreality when it comes to explaining how things work in the world. No astrology, no alchemy, no holistic medicine or faith healing, no supernatural beings,  no Santa Claus.

The thing is, taking what might sound like a ‘hard line’ approach has not meant any diminution in our household’s appreciation of the wonders of the world we live in. We find it extremely uplifting and inspiring, for example, to contemplate the vastness of the universe: my husband has been reading Sizing Up the Universe and sharing all kinds of astonishing facts that expand the imagination beyond the utmost bounds of human thought. Who can watch Planet Earth and not be overwhelmed with the beauty and terror of nature in ways that could be described as spiritual? Richard Dawkins’s wonderful series of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Growing Up in the Universe, is an eloquent and invigorating appreciation of our known place in time and space; his new book The Magic of Reality is wrapped and under the tree now, tagged “for the whole family.”

Yes, under the tree, because as I’ve written about before on this blog, I don’t think there’s any hypocrisy in a family of atheists celebrating Christmas. The spirit we celebrate in is that expressed by George Eliot in a well-known line from one of her letters: “The idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human.” Ours is a Christmas–and a Santa–that is “entirely human,” and known to be so. Our kids know that the presents under our tree come from their friends and family. Instead of being (putatively) supernaturally outsourced, our gift-giving is between us, the presents tangible reminders of and connections to our friends and family. I think it’s actually much nicer to think that someone thought of you particularly and wanted to bring some pleasure and interest into your life by giving you something they knew you would enjoy. “It’s nice to know presents come from people who love you,” Maddie said to me the other day as we looked at the cheerful array of packages, and I completely agree.

We have a somewhat unusual approach to Christmas presents in our household. Some years ago, reflecting on the effect Christmas morning was having on us all–cluttered and overwhelmed–we decided to spread out the present opening across Christmas break. Now the children open one gift each every morning starting the day after school ends (the parents take turns too, though a little less often). We put on a little festive music, the parents sit down with their tea and coffee, the kids take turns reading our daily installment from our Christmas Carol Advent Calendar, and then they pick something out and open it while everyone is relaxed, attentive, and cheerful. It’s much easier to appreciate a gift when it’s the only one you are opening that day! Also, because of the kinds of gifts we tend to give in our family–lots of books, but also puzzles, games, and cozy things to wear–this also makes the break more fun, because each day there’s something new to read or play or snuggle in. (We don’t take a particularly extravagant approach: I learned from my mother that Christmas and birthdays are good times to restock the basics.  My kids always know they will have both new books and new socks by the end of the season!)  Sizing Up the Universe was one of my husband’s gifts this year; Maddie has been enjoying the new Jacqueline Wilson novel she opened yesterday and snuggling in her new soft hoodie from Aeropostale; Owen has been reading avidly in Cliff Pickover’s The Math Book and having a lot of fun playing Kirby’s Epic Yarn with the rest of us;  I’m looking forward to starting Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.  There’s a box under the tree that sounds an awful lot like a new jigsaw puzzle, which will be nice to work on with some music playing, on one of the snowy afternoons I’m sure we’ll have. Each present we open (like each present we send–and we do a lot of sending, since all of our extended family lives far away) always feels to me like one end of an invisible thread connecting us to the other people in our lives. Santa Claus makes for some great stories, but the reality is every bit as nice to think about, and it has the added virtue of being true.

So, from me to you, Merry Christmas!

Vera Brittain, Testament of Experience

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Testament of Experience continues the story of Vera Brittain’s life more or less from the point Testament of Youth leaves off. Though both volumes are autobiographical, Testament of Experience seems more conventionally autobiographical to me, in that it is specifically and deliberately the story of Brittain’s own life, while Testament of Youth approaches the history of her generation through her individual life, taking her personal experiences, not as typical, but as in many ways exemplary of the transformations wrought on all those whose youth was interrupted so catastrophically by the First World War.  There is a similar impulse to look out from personal experiences in Testament of Experience, but usually as a more deliberate pause in the action–an opportunity taken to reflect, or to record reflections–rather than a function of the work as a whole. Overall, Testament of Experience is more directly and simply a record of what happened to Brittain between 1925 and 1950.

As a result, Testament of Experience is a less profound and compelling read than Testament of Youth (and a less original and inspiring one than Testament of Friendship, which is not really autobiography). That’s not to say, however, that it is not extremely interesting, even gripping at times. For one thing, Brittain herself is an unusual and interesting person leading, especially as her story goes on, a genuinely unusual and interesting life: it’s a story that deserves telling. After World War II ends, as her literary and political fortunes rise again after the slump caused, during the war, by her outspoken pacifism, it maybe gets a bit tedious as it becomes more or less a travelogue, but then, she’s traveling not only in post-war Europe but in Egypt and India, and even her most perfunctory accounts of what she sees and does are never actually dull. Still, the last third or so of the book was my least favorite part.

The first part begins with her marriage to George Catlin (“G.” throughout), about which I wrote briefly before. I picked up the Berry and Bostridge biography of Brittain recently and will turn to it soon for a different look at this relationship. Brittain’s own account emphasizes both the value and the struggle of a marriage in which both partners granted each other the right to pursue vocational opportunities and priorities without binding them to conventional models of family and household. At the end of the book, returning home from a trip to India in great anxiety that G., severely ill with influenza, will die before she arrives, Brittain  thinks about “the family life we had built up together–so happy, for all the sorrows which had shadowed it; so united in spite of the minor internal differences”: “each had offered to the other a loyalty, a certainty, an unshaken source of perpetual strength.” That strength did not come from perpetual togetherness–far from it, as it sometimes seems (and may in fact be the case) that they spent more time apart than together. But why should marriage be defined in that way? Writing about her novel Born in 1925 to her editor, Brittain says,

This book deals with one conflict which must, I feel, be universal in an absolute sense: the conflict which arises from the dichotomy which exists almost everywhere between family life, and public and professional achievement. Why public insignificance should be the price of family unity, and family discord so often the price of eminence, is surely a problem that must have exercised thousands of families all over the world.

It may well be that she smoothed over the difficulties and resentments of their attempts to balance private and public life, but the picture she gives her (though she nods occasionally towards unspecified problems) is of a couple that simply resolved, having found resignation of professional achievement unacceptable on either side, to be partnered rather than paired. She sees Nehru’s sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, India’s ambassador to Moscow and Washington and later India’s High Commissioner in Britain, as a symbol “of the changes which had come for women in [her] lifetime”:

Through the conflict of marriage and career that revolution had been as costly, in achievements and opportunities, to G. as to myself. Yet however painful its personal consequences at the outset of our marriage, we had both, I thought, recognized their impersonal aspect.

The mistakes had been many but the treasures of mutual discovery had been many too, and the early years of conflict and occasional resistance were now far away. Our very problems had made us part of a concerned minority fighting against the dead-weight of convention for a woman’s right to combine normal human relationships with mental and spiritual fulfilment.

She expects that their daughter Shirley will “no more find marriage an end in itself than I had,” but hopes that “in the process of becoming a complete human being she would not meet with the criticisms, the obstacles, and the traditional assumptions which had handicapped my generation.” It’s interesting, coming as I am straight out of a term including a course on the Victorian ‘woman question,’ much of which revolved around exactly that conflict between traditional assumptions and obstacles and women’s efforts to become complete human beings, to see how her account of the problem (and her hope of its eventual solution) line up with those from the previous century. From our vantage point, we would probably still acknowledge only mixed success in overcoming these conflicts.

Her account of the war years is dramatic: her family had a number of brushes with catastrophe, including G.’s ship (on one of his many Atlantic crossings) being torpedoed. A malfunctioning alarm led to his nearly missing the lifeboats, but in the end he was one of the last to get into one:

A strong sea was running in bitter December cold. Every few moments the lifeboats ran into squalls of rain, and huge waves swamped the sailors trying to head them into the wind. G. spent the first part of his eight hours on the sea in baling out water.

Half an hour after the first torpedo had struck, he saw the flash of the submarine’s conning-tower among the boats. The sailors saw it too; “a terrible tension like a white shadow passed over their faces,” James Bone, a fellow passenger, wrote afterwards in the Manchester Guardian. But the submarine commander waited for the boats to get clear before putting another torpedo into the Western Prince. A violent explosion followed, and in half a minute, amid a roar of flame, the liner was gone.

The passengers’ adventures weren’t over yet…but I won’t spoil the suspense for any prospective readers, except to note (as it is obvious from everything else!) that G. makes it safely back to Vera. He tells the full story in a broadcast for the BBC, but his “tribute to the submarine commander whose delayed action had spared their lives” is censored, on the grounds that he might be penalized by “his Nazi masters” for his merciful conduct. This desire on G.’s part to show appropriate gratitude to one of “the enemy” touches on the larger theme of the book, the one dearest to Brittain’s heart: the calamity that war is for common humanity. She writes at length about her ‘conversion’ to pacifism as a principle for life and action. Her work on behalf of this cause leads her to be constrained from international travel during the war, as the authorities consider her loyalties suspect; she also faces other kinds of suspicion, hostility, and discrimination, so that the book that begins with her rise to fame for writing Testament of Youth then covers, as she is very aware, a significant fall in her fortunes and reputation–only to show her restored and more, when WWII ends and it becomes not just possible but popular to debate the part played by the Allies in its horrors. The discovery that her name (like G.’s) was on the Gestapo’s list of people to arrest immediately in the event of Britain’s defeat goes a long way to prove her own view, which was always that to oppose war was to oppose Nazism and Fascism at the most fundamental level.

There’s no doubting the moral challenge of defending pacifism during WWII: as Carolyn Heilbrun writes in her introduction to this volume, “if ever war could be justified, Hitler seemed to have justified it.” But Brittain is clear that to her there is no moral distinction to be made between the German bombings of Coventry or London and the devastation wrought by the Allied bombings of Germany and Japan. Visiting Cologne in 1947, she describes the “appalling” impression made on her during this, her third visit to the city:

By contrast with the two thousand years of history which it had enshrined in stone and gold, it epitomised all the horror and loss of the Second World War. The damage suggested Arnhem multiplied by ten; the ultimate limit of destruction where civilisation finally broke down.

Brittain is eloquent about pacifism and for it represented nothing like the easiest position to support at all, much less publicly. It was (perhaps unfairly) disappointing to me that she explained her commitment to it, as well as much of her reaction to this second war she witnessed, in religious terms. After the resolute intellectualism of Testament of Youth, here she falls into the language of revelation, which can never really carry explanatory power for someone who does not share the same beliefs. On V.E. day, for instance, walking up Whitehall, she testifies to an immense “certainty” that has its basis, not in the literal experience she has been recounting, or in the logical exercise of her reason, but in something for which she can assert no evidence, only, really, a feeling:

I could not yet believe in the Easter morning and the meeting again; I did not expect to see Edward or Roland or Winifred in any future conceivable by human consciousness. But of the existence of a benign Rule, a spiritual imperative behind the anarchy and chaos of man’s wilful folly, I was now wholly assured; the superficial faith which the First War destroyed had been replaced by an adult conviction. Like the girl student in Glorious Morning, I knew that God lived, and that the sorrow and suffering in the world around me had come because men refused to obey His laws. The self-interested, provocative policies which had driven mankind to the edge of the abyss seemed to supply incontrovertible testimony that an opposite policy–the way of God, the road of the Cross–would produce an opposite result.

Though this is moving as an expression of her state of mind, there’s nothing convincing about this as an explanation of what she has experienced, especially when her books document over and over that both suffering and its alleviation result directly from human choices and actions. She may have come to believe that there’s an overarching supernatural force at work in this, but the “incontrovertible testimony” for that is that only of her faith, not of the historical record to which her books make such a fascinating contribution.

One way to measure the value of that contribution is itself testified to mid-way through Testament of Experience, in a letter she receives:

My correspondent described an incident related by her fiancé, a young political officer in the Sudan who had been given the task of clearing a battlefield “somewhere in Abyssinia.” Within the shadow of a wall he found a British soldier lying dead; in his hand a copy of Testament of Youth was open at the Villanelle, “Violets from Plug Street Wood,” sent me by Roland from Flanders in 1915. . . .

Brittain remarks that this is evidence against the “bureaucratic suspicion” of her loyalties: how, I suppose her logic went, could a soldier cling to anything that betrayed his own loyalty to his country, proven in this case by his giving up his life for it? But the picture of the dead soldier with her book in his hand, open to a poem about love, death, and remembrance, is also a poignant gesture towards what, in the end, we might imagine is worth fighting, even dying, for: not glory or profit, territory or power, but the freedom of mind for which Brittain herself, in her own way, fought throughout her life.

This Week in My Classes: Exams!

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Last night I invigilated a three-hour exam for my 19th-Century Fiction class; Saturday is the three-hour exam for my Mystery and Detective Fiction class. Papers for all three classes (from everyone in the seminar, and from those who did the essay option in the other two) came in on Monday. So mostly what I’m doing this week is pacing and marking! I’m making decent but not great progress on the essays–I have about 10 left. I haven’t started the exams yet, but tomorrow I’ll be working on the first set in alternation with the papers, and next week of course I need to get everything wrapped up so that I can submit this term’s grades … and move on to prepping for next term.

In some ways I’m not a big fan of exams. I know that they are not always reliable indicators of what students know or what kind of thinking and writing they are capable of, and I don’t think students retain all that well material they cram into their heads during intense last-minute study sessions. On the other hand, there are always some students who flourish in exam situations–who find themselves released from whatever writer’s block made them fumble on essays, or who (whether out of brilliance or desperation, who knows) become remarkably insightful on the fly. Exams also are one more way to take stock of who has done all the reading and who is good at doing the kind of analysis I’ve been trying to teach them, and this is what they are, after all, earning a course credit for. The real reason I keep holding exams for my courses, though, is really quite cynical: I feel that I need the threat of the exam as a motivator over the term. Students, understandably, set priorities, and my experience has been that, perhaps because exams are (or seem) so concrete and measurable, students often ‘prioritize’ exam preparation over other work. (This tendency often manifests itself in the form of late papers submitted with the shameless “excuse” that the students didn’t meet my deadline because they had to study for their chem or psych or Spanish midterms.)

So holding exams is one way to make sure I’m in the game, competing with their other courses for priority. Also, knowing that there will be an exam that covers all of the course material is a helpful incentive for them to actually  do the reading, come to class, and take notes, and these things make our class time much more productive for all of us. Some students need this incentive more than others, of course, but sadly I find nothing focuses attention in the room more visibly than prefacing an exercise or example with “this is the kind of thing I’m likely to ask about on the exam” or “this is a favorite exam passage of mine.” I try to use this phenomenon to our collective advantage: my goal is to get them interested in the readings, to help them learn how to analyze them, etc. To reach these goals, they need to be paying attention. If they are paying attention in part because they are worried that, if they don’t, they won’t do well on the exam, that’s fine with me. In the past couple of weeks I have had more than one conversation with a student who said that they planned to use some of the time before the exam “to finish reading X book”–and since another of my goals is to have them just do all the reading that the course credit they are getting suggests they have done, that’s good too. I try to make my exams thorough, transparent, and fair: I work on practice questions and passages, which we do together in class, and I relate the skills we are practicing in doing this to the other work we’re doing in the course. I make no effort to catch them out, though I do cover the full range of course material. I give out the essay questions in advance so that they can plan their answers.

I don’t hold exams in all my classes. There are no exams in my honours seminars, for instance, where I assume a higher level of commitment and make different kinds of demands (including more emphasis on class participation) across the whole term. I also won’t have an exam in my Close Reading class next term: not only will be we doing a lot of very challenging writing and editing, but it’s not a class that emphasizes coverage, whether of material or of terminology, or skills that can be quickly demonstrated and assessed. But overall I think exams do more good than harm in my classes. There’s even some real satisfaction in marking the good ones and seeing how much students know. Sometimes, bless their hearts, they even write little ‘thanks for the course’ notes at the end. After three stressful hours of exam-writing, that’s pretty generous of them.

Last night’s exam went by more quickly because I brought along Testament of Experience to read. I was at a terribly exciting section: not only was Vera in London enduring the Blitz, but G. was crossing the Atlantic by boat and was torpedoed! Though in some ways this volume is not as surprising or intellectually satisfying to read as the first two, it’s still a remarkable story told by a woman whose life is itself a testament to ideas and commitment, and her account of the devastation of the war is gripping and occasionally heart-rending. More about that later…maybe I’ll be able to finish it during Saturday’s invigilation.

Mark Bauerlein’s “The Research Bust”

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

I have mixed but mostly negative feelings about Mark Bauerlein’s recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about literary research. Reporting on a study* he did for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Bauerlein argues that (most) literary research and publishing is not worth the investment of time and money that goes into it. His major evidence in support of this argument is that academic books and articles aren’t cited very much. Interestingly, he doesn’t argue that this is because they aren’t any good, that they aren’t worth doing because they contribute nothing to knowledge or understanding, or because they are opaque to the lay reader (popular forms of the attack on academic criticism, both of which are to be found in the long comments thread on his post) . In fact, he opens with the example of an article that is “learned, wide-ranging, and conversant with scholarship on the poet and theoretical currents in literary studies. The argument is dense, the analysis acute, on its face a worthy illustration of academic study deserving broad notice and integration into subsequent research in the field.” What he finds, however, after diligently entering the article’s title into Google Scholar, is only “a handful of sentences of commentary on the original article by other scholars in the 10 years after its publication.” There’s a dramatic imbalance, as he sees it, between the input (“100-plus hours of hard work by a skilled academic, plus the money the university paid the professor to conduct the research”) and the impact (” we can be sure of only a few scholars who incorporated it into their work”).

There’s plenty to be said about Bauerlein’s methodology, and some of the comments on the piece are sharp about the reliability of citations indexes in general and Google Scholar in particular, as well as about his very reductive notion of impact, which doesn’t consider the impact of scholarship that is read but not formally cited, read as teaching preparation, and so on. That we can’t count something doesn’t make it irrelevant, and all practising scholars know from their own first-hand experience, I’m sure, that they read and are influenced in their thinking by a great deal of material that never makes it into their footnotes or bibliographies.

But suppose we grant Bauerlein a modified version of his quantitative point: suppose it’s true that much specialized research does not change the conversation the way its authors probably hope it will. In fact, my own experience to some extent supports this–not only of watching the fate of my own publications, but of burrowing through masses of work by other scholars that really does, as Bauerlein says, “overwhelm[] the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output.” What puzzles and disturbs me is what Bauerlein believes follows from this ‘finding,’ which is that we ought to stop doing (or at least funding) literary scholarship (he doesn’t actually say this in so many words, and at some points seems to be making the more temperate suggestion that we simply scale back expectations and output). Along the way to this modest proposal he also makes some dubious further claims–or at least claims that would require a great deal more nuance and specificity to be satisfactory.

Further to his point about the overwhelming mountain of publications, for instance, he proposes that we have “reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields.” But his examples  are Melville and George Eliot, two of the most emphatically canonical authors imaginable. Yes, it’s a near impossibility to read “all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year”: I can’t do it–I wouldn’t want to do it. But the realities of specialization are also such that I don’t need to do it: there isn’t one subfield of George Eliot scholarship anymore but a multiplicity of potential angles on George Eliot, and the researcher’s task is to navigate among the available material to find what’s relevant. Yes, that’s difficult, even frustrating at times, but it’s hard to see how a continuing “cascade of research” is a sign of exhaustion: surely it’s a sign that people are still finding questions to ask, and doing their best to answer them? In these cases it may be true that the results will matter only to ” a microscopic audience of interested readers,” but that’s what happens in all highly specialized fields, not just in the humanities. The objection, then, can only be that for some reason literary subjects are not suited to specialization, which seems a suspect argument, one that harks back to a time when literary scholars were comfortably certain they knew what needed to be known and said about the books that really mattered, and those books and that knowledge could be neatly summed up and pronounced upon.

Having said this much, I should acknowledge what readers of this blog (certainly, any who have read it from its early days!) already know about me, which is that I have often complained about the pressure of specialization and the related trend towards metacriticism. I started blogging in part because of my own dissatisfaction with the norms of academic literary criticism. My early complaints about that got me in hot water with a commenter who charged me with “offering nourishment” to those who want “to eliminate literary studies from university curricula altogether.” Though I know more now than I did then about these kinds of criticisms of and attacks on the academic humanities, my view continues to be that what we need is not to end, but to diversify the kinds of research and writing that institutions recognize and support as valuable uses of academic expertise. There needs to be room for ‘knowledge dissemination’ that serves non-specialist purposes and audiences, for instance. Some researchers have less inclination and talent for microspecialization, but excel at synthesis and exposition–I think that is actually where my own strengths lie. But ask any academic whether writing a textbook or a popularization (or a series of reviews and essays in a non-academic, non-peer-reviewed journal) “counts” the same way that 5001st study of Melville will, when it comes time for hiring, tenure, or promotion, or just for earning the respect and support of your institution and administration…

To return to Bauerlein’s argument, the 5001st article on Melville may yet have its value to the small group of Melville specialists, provided it is, like the article he mentions in his opening, a high quality piece of professional scholarship. But it’s true that it can’t maximize its impact if it is not widely read, and the burden of reading 5000 other studies may be too much for most scholars. I think Bauerlein is right to suggest that quantitative measures for tenure and promotion are detrimental to individual scholars as well as to the profession as a whole.  (I interviewed for one position where I was told I would need two books or six articles for tenure. That’s absurd, not least because the fetishization of books creates what I described in an earlier post as “the corrupting pressure to inflate, not only our prose and our manuscripts, but our claims.”) The MLA has been making the argument for decentering the monograph for years now, but as Bauerlein points out, “nobody wants to take the first step in reducing the demand.” Between the crisis in academic publishing and the changing demands and expectations of scholars themselves, perhaps eventually the ‘publish or perish’ model will be reformed.

But let’s consider, again, the article Bauerlein opens with. The problem Bauerlein identifies is not that the author’s time (and the university’s resources) were wasted because the article never needed to be written the first place, but because the article had little measurable impact–it didn’t make a conspicuous difference to the field. Again, Bauerlein’s claims are undermined by their lack of specificity: depending on how specialized the essay’s argument is, perhaps nobody should expect it to transform the overall discussion about that particular canonical poet. The 10-year time frame also does not allow for the glacially slow pace of academic publishing. But let’s, again, grant him a modified version of his premise, this time that the impact of the piece really was inappropriately (or unfortunately) light. Why isn’t that a reason, not to stop producing learned, wide-ranging, acute analysis, but to change the mechanisms for circulating it? What’s wrong with the processes, the apparatus, of our scholarship, if good ideas are not circulating as widely as they should? How can we open up the research and publishing process so that scholars engage each other in more direct, productive conversations? Why aren’t the scholars working in this area actually talking to each other–not face to face, but through Twitter, blogs, listservs, or other kinds of scholarly networks? Is it that there are too many of them, each of them individually overwhelmed by the difficulty of trying to keep up with the output of scholarship from others? Or is it something about their work habits–keeping their heads down, trying to beat the tenure clock, looking only so far and no further? Is the sheer pressure to publish a lot a disincentive to more exhaustive research? What are the logistical impediments, in other words, to improving the circulation of ideas? Also, how can we change the way we work so that the value Bauerlein himself claims to recognize in an essay such as that one can be perceived by readers outside the academy as well? Why is the best response to a (perceived) oversupply of exemplary scholarship to denigrate or even halt the scholarship, rather than to champion it and ask that we and our institutions work to solve the problem of its reception and distribution?

From Bauerlein’s perspective, the answer would appear to be that he thinks literary research has already run its course–that there’s really nothing left of any significance for scholars to find out, at least not on behalf of the rest of us. But here his choice of George Eliot and Melville is misleading, if not disingenuous. I’m prepared to concede that the latest articles on George Eliot are pretty specialized. Indeed, I have nearly lost interest in reading them myself, and I don’t want to be compelled to contribute to them myself. Curiosity-driven research can hardly, in consistency, be made compulsory. But I don’t think that means they have no value (why should my interests and preferences be the arbiter?), and I wouldn’t want to propose (as Bauerlein certainly implies) that “saturation” means “completion”–what would it mean to be finished studying something? how could we ever be sure we have found out everything there is to know? “We can no longer pretend … that studies of Emily Dickinson are as needed today,” Bauerlein proclaims, but how can he know this? There’s some irony in his relying on simple quantity of research to decide there’s nothing of interest or value left to be said. Still, perhaps in these cases scholars are working mostly for each other. Again, this happens in all fields once you reach a certain level of specialization.

Suppose we consider if every subfield is as densely populated as those he cites, however. I’ve been looking up Winifred Holtby: there’s very little scholarship about her novels, compared to the vast output on her Bloomsbury contemporaries. That absence of material is already provocative, to my mind: what has given one literary movement so much more critical value? In learning more about Holtby and Brittain, I feel that I am also learning (again) about the ways our scholarship is shaped by expectations and priorities that are not intrinsic to the literature but may, in fact, interfere with our understanding of its forms and ideas. Much was made at one time about the “end of history”: does Bauerlein believe we have reached the end of literary history? Surely not. The landscape of literary studies is in constant flux, not just in the theoretical apparatus readers bring to primary texts, but in our selection of primary texts to look at in the first place. Imagine if we had concluded, as a profession, that Leavis’s The Great Tradition was the last word on the British novel, or that the list of Oxford World’s Classics as of, say, 1970, was definitive. In my own undergraduate course on the Victorian novel, in 1988, the term “sensation fiction” never came up–and neither did Elizabeth Gaskell. In our discussion of Jane Eyre, at no point did we consider whether British imperialism was a significant context. In my own academic lifetime and my own specialized field, that is, there have been enormous changes in just a couple of decades. It’s easy to take the horizons of our own interests and knowledge as actual limits on what is worth asking or knowing, but surely the last 100 years of literary studies have shown us just how limiting and even dangerous that assumption can be. What a depressingly anti-intellectual proposition, that we have nothing more to learn or say, or that even if we do, it’s not worth finding it out. It’s precisely because we can’t foresee the significance of research that we need to preserve a space to do it open-mindedly, in a spirit of sheer intellectual curiosity. Up close, in the moment, it may be difficult to discern how or where the multitude of individual projects is moving us–but yet, look back and see what a different place we are in now. Who, in 1900, or 1950, or even 1980, could have told us what would turn out to make the most difference?

Ah, but you see, all that research is expensive. As Bauerlein says, “we cannot devote our energies to projects of little consequence”–but note the presumed correlation between measurable impact and “consequence.” And, again, “impact” is a complex issue, one hardly amenable to simple metrics. What will those “undergraduate reading groups” Bauerlein wants us to lead (in lieu of going to conferences or archives) be talking about in 10 or 20 years, if specialized research grinds to a halt? Exactly the same things we would bring to them today, I suppose–but why would we want time to stand still in that way? Or, how will he decide who will carry on the research while the rest of us focus on mentoring undergraduates (not, presumably, to be scholars) and “pushing foreign languages in general-education requirements”? (How that last is the particular responsibility of English professors, I’m not clear.) Bauerlein argues,

 If a professor who makes $75,000 a year spends five years on a book on Charles Dickens (which sold 43 copies to individuals and 250 copies to libraries, the library copies averaging only two checkouts in the six years after its publication), the university paid $125,000 for its production. Certainly that money could have gone toward a more effective appreciation of that professor’s expertise and talent.

But that professor’s “expertise” is surely in part defined (and expanded) precisely by that long-term effort to know more about Dickens. Why is it a “more effective appreciation” of that professor to discourage  (and perhaps even to prevent, by withholding time and resources) the research and publication of the book? (How can you judge the importance of the book’s ideas from the number of times it has been checked out, anyway? Haven’t you ever just sat in the stacks and read stuff?)

Bauerlein is right to challenge the reigning paradigm that values quantity over quality and specialization over synthesis and accessibility. But throughout the piece, there’s an uneasy slippage between making the case for a more rational, deliberative research model and a wholesale dismissal of the entire enterprise. At one point he acknowledges that “research is an intellectual good,” but then he shrugs it off as “ineffectual toil.” He concedes that those who object to his position are not wrong “on principle”–but then rules them out of order on grounds of pragmatism. He agrees that research “makes better teachers and colleagues” but then he characterizes it as the pursuit of an identity that is alluring because it “flatter[s] people that they have cutting-edge brilliance”–as if literary research is no more than egotistical posturing. (Perhaps he has been reading Eugenides?) He concludes by looking forward to the waning of “the research years of literary study.” As many of the comments on his piece show, this kind of thing is music to the ears of those who see no value at all in what we do–his gestures towards moderation and reform are eclipsed by his larger narrative of excess and waste.

That Bauerlein’s column is clearly having a large impact (as measured by external links–including both Arts and Letters Daily and the Book Bench–as well as by the number of comments it has garnered) seems to me pretty good evidence that we need better ways to measure what a piece of writing is really worth.

*I haven’t read the entire study; my response is just to the presentation of its main ideas in the Chronicle article.

Book Club: Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

My local book club met this morning for brunch and our discussion of Paula McLain’s ‘The Paris Wife. The brunch (at Pipa’s) was delicious. The book was …. well, dreadful is probably too strong a word, but generally deprecated as bland, lifeless, and devoid of both art and ideas. Some of the group felt it was wholly insincere as well, a marketing ploy meant to catch readers who (like us) think a personal perspective on the whole 1920s Paris literary scene sounds pretty interesting.

And in fact that whole scene is interesting, and so almost in spite of itself the novel is too, because Pound and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Scott and Zelda and Paris and bullfights are all interesting. What we all found so disappointing is how little the author did with this material. There’s no reflection in the novel, no engagement with the literary passion and experimentation these writers represent–there’s certainly no stylistic flair or experimentation on McLain’s part, no sense of an idea behind the book beyond putting in everything the author had found in her sources. Hadley’s voice is so pedestrian that after a while I thought I could understand why any writer would eventually divorce her: who would want to listen to her? There’s so little substance to her character, too (could this have been true of her in real life?)–she has no focus, no ambition, no sense of purpose, and no insight into the strange and intellectually demanding world of the writers around her. But Hemingway too is flattened out so that his overbearing, charismatic personality (for which he is at least as famous as for his writing) has to be taken on faith, as it can’t be discerned from the narration. The only break from Hadley’s “and then, and then, and then” recounting of people and events is the occasional small section from Hemingway’s point of view, but these seem so disconnected from Hadley’s commentary that some of us suspected they were added in belatedly, perhaps at the suggestion of an editor thinking they would add a desirable whiff of literariness.

These judgments sound harsh, and in fairness I should add that everyone agreed a novel from this point of view was a potentially rich concept, that some scenes were effective, or at least believable, and that the author had obviously done a lot of homework. That’s really not much to say on the novel’s behalf, but it’s all we could come up with. Oh, and we thought it would make a pretty good movie, because, again, the milieu and characters have intrinsic interest, the setting could be better conveyed on screen than it was in the novel, and there’s nothing of formal significance to be lost in the translation from one medium to another (unlike, say, Wolf Hall, where capturing the novel’s unique treatment of point of view seems like it would be a genuine challenge for a director and a real loss if it were simply ignored).

In keeping with our plan to follow a link from one book to the next–but also because we are feeling soured on new releases festooned with hype–we have chosen Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier for our next book.

This Week in My Classes: Easing Up

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I could almost have said “winding down” instead of “easing up” except that with final papers and exams still to go, we are still a couple of weeks away from actually being done. The big difference now, with classes almost over (I have one more class hour to go!), the pressure is much less. The last month or so of term is always such a relentless crush, with every finished task replaced (or so it often seems) with two more unfinished ones; you no sooner leave class feeling it went well (or not) when it occurs to you that you have to be ready to go again in a couple of days; and even as you keep up the reading and routine class preparation and meetings and so forth, assignments come in and you find you are either working constantly or feeling guilty whenever you’re not. With no more lectures or seminars to prepare and no more new assigned reading to do, now the job requirements can more or less be done in business hours–hooray! I have already spent more time (or at least more cheerful time) with my kids in the last couple of days than perhaps in the last few weeks: I try hard not to shunt them aside, but inevitably my stress and the pressures of work obligations get in the way. This weekend Maddie and I went to our happy place, Clay Café, for instance, where we indulged in a little tranquil creativity. I have no particular artistic talent, but we both thoroughly enjoy listening to their collection of vintage LPs and thinking about nothing but colours and patterns for a few hours. I’ve played plenty of Mario Kart with Owen, too, and hung out while he showed me the various projects he’s working on on his computer. Just for myself, I have started watching MI-5 on Netflix: I was put on to the series when I learned Richard Armitage is in the later seasons, but I figured I’d start at the beginning. It’s pretty stressful, but it’s not my stress, and it goes down well with a little wine at the end of the day.

Soon, though, when I feel recovered enough, I’ll be reading more: I’ve started Testament of Experience and I just went to the library yesterday and signed out a few related books including the Oxford History of Oxford and Brittain’s The Women at Oxford. Now that my “Somerville Novelists” course is officially a “go” for next fall, I feel woefully underqualified for it, but happily I am eager to make up the deficit. I can’t tell you how good it felt to be in the library feeling genuinely curious. I also have a stack of miscellaneous unread books I am looking forward to–though of course there’s not that long a break before classes start again in January, and over the same short span I also have to prepare for my winter term classes. Still, for a while at least my nights and weekends are my own, and that is a welcome change.

Also, I have some blogging to do! I have let slide a couple of posts that I thought a lot about writing, one a response to Hook and Eye about approaching your Ph.D. as “your first job,” and one, more recently, some kind of response–I haven’t figured out quite what kind–to Mark Bauerlein’s Chronicle of Higher Education piece about humanities publishing. I just didn’t have the energy to think through the mixed feelings both posts set off, but both are topics of immediate interest to me and ones I have written about at some length here over the years. The Bauerlein piece in particular provokes me–my response is at once “Yes, absolutely!” and “No! Not at all! You are so wrong!” I’ll see if I can sort that out a bit better. If I do, you’ll see the results here!

But first, off I go to my review session for 19th-Century Fiction. I told them on Monday that they could consider it optional but that it was in their interests to be their and that I would be bringing cookies, both of which statements are true! I wonder what attendance will be like. If it’s small, well, more cookies for me.

Update: Attendance was excellent for the review class–I got only 1 cookie!